While the plugin has never been open source, it has always been free to download for anyone. This has changed; Oracle has raised the price from free to 90 USD per user, and you have to order a minimum of 100 licenses, raising the minimum price to 9000 USD. You can also opt to buy Oracle’s service for the plugin, which will be another 19.80 USD per user for the first year.

Even though Microsoft included support for the Open Document Format in Office with the release of Microsoft Office 2007, it only covers ODF version 1.0; the Sun/Oracle plugin covers version 1.2, which is used in OpenOffice 3.2. In other words, you’ll now have to pay considerable money in order to use ODF with Microsoft Office.

Oracle was not available for comment on the change, sadly. A single user license for the plugin is now almost as expensive as the cheapest version of Microsoft Office, which seems a little, well, idiotic, to me – then again, I’m sure the people at Oracle aren’t stupid.

This is probably why Microsoft claimed to introduce ODF 1.0 support in Microsoft Office 2007, but in reality, that support doesn’t work at all.

From a strategic point of view, Oracle charging money for proper support of ODF from Microsoft Office makes sense, because now Microsoft Office becomes even less viable as the Office suite for working with ODF.

If one wants to work with ODF, which is an excellent thing to do from the point of view of interoperability, by far the best choice is OpenOffice.org.

OpenOffice.org always was the best choice, but now even the pretence that Microsoft Office could be used is difficult to keep up. This move by Oracle effectively diminishes Microsoft Office as a potential competitor to OpenOffice.org.

This is probably why Microsoft claimed to introduce ODF 1.0 support in Microsoft Office 2007, but in reality, that support doesn’t work at all.

My experience so far has been that Microsoft’s implementation of ODF his horrendously broken to the point of being unusable; the only way to reliably get ODF support in Office is to use the Sun Microsystems plugin.

It will be interesting to see the pricing policy of StarOffice/OpenOffice.org when compared to the ODF plugin and whether there is an attempt to make the plugin so unattractive but the desire to use ODF is so attractive that people choose to run OpenOffice.org/StarOffice. Don’t get me wrong, I think that if Oracle allocated a few million, hired another 100 programmers to work on OpenOffice.org it could really pull ahead of Microsoft Office but in its current state the only thing OpenOffice.org really has going for it is the fact that it is cheap – which in the business world, the cost isn’t just that of the software but also productivity lost/gained, compatibility and so on.

This move by Oracle effectively diminishes Microsoft Office as a potential competitor to OpenOffice.org.

The problem with that position is the complete dominance of MS Office and the defacto document standard is whatever MS puts out. Oracle is certainly not in a position to dictate one way or the other.

This is not MS Office being a competitor to OOo/StarOffice. This is OOo/StarOffice being a very weak competitor to MS Office. If you work from an underdog position, you need to sweeten the deal as much as possible. One such thing is making it very easy and cheap to adopt YOUR document standard. Oracle doesn’t do that.

For better or worse, right now ODF is what MS puts out there. Anything that cannot read and write MS ODF is useless to an end user. The Sun plugin was a cost free and effective way to make sure that MS Office at least read and wrote ODF that all others can read and write too. Now ODF is either gratis, but the MS version of it or it is an expensive $90 per seat proposition.

I can just see the reaction from the bean counters. “What? StarOffice costs amount X per seat and then we need Y $90 plugin licenses to make that thing talk to MS Office? We’ll keep using MS Office. That only costs us Z and then we can read and write legacy MS docs, OOXML docs and ODF docs at no additional cost.” The sad part is that they are right with this reasoning too. As long as everybody stays in the MS realm, MS Office does read and write all.

We need to look at this with MS centric glasses. This is OOo/StarOffice seeking a way in and not about a way of keeping MS out. MS is already in. Oracle raising the cost of a niche document format is not going to spur ODF adoption. MS has enough tick marks on the standards list to appear a reasonable choice. Even if MS doesn’t follow those standards to a T, it doesn’t matter. It only matters to those who operate outside of the MS Office sphere and we can be neglected. The majority will never have any problems with MS Office reading and writing ODF-ish and OOXML-ish documents.

MS has enough tick marks on the standards list to appear a reasonable choice. Even if MS doesn’t follow those standards to a T, it doesn’t matter. It only matters to those who operate outside of the MS Office sphere and we can be neglected. The majority will never have any problems with MS Office reading and writing ODF-ish and OOXML-ish documents.

That doesn’t look like a “tick mark” to me, coming as it does from Alex Brown, the convener of ISO’s OOXML subcommittee (SC34).

“The simple validators developed by me (Office-o-tron) and by Jesper Lund Stocholm (ISO/IEC 29500 Validator) reveal, to Microsoft’s dismay, that the output documents of the Office 2010 Beta are non-conformant, and that this is in large part due to glaring uncorrected problems in the text [of the specification],” he wrote. “I confidently predict that fuller validation of Office document is likely to reveal many problems both with those documents, and with the Standard itself, over the coming years.”

At this time, the writing is on the wall for the removal of ISO/IEC 29500 as a standard, because there will be no software which uses it.

That doesn’t look like a “tick mark” to me, coming as it does from Alex Brown, the convener of ISO’s OOXML subcommittee (SC34)

How many people follow the statements of Alex Brown? How many follow the marketing speak of MS? I have a gut feeling that more people read the MS brochure.

OOXML has never been about MS opening up. It has been about muddying the waters for ODF. When ODF was ratified as an international ISO standard and government bodies started to take an interest, MS scrambled to get OOXML “standardized”. They did everything they could to avoid being forced to support ODF in MS Office. OOXML was the diversion to hush the government officials back to sleep.

At this time, the writing is on the wall for the removal of ISO/IEC 29500 as a standard, because there will be no software which uses it.

At which point MS sighs with relief as they don’t have to pretend anymore to co-develop and follow the ISO standard. They can always point at the rubberstamped ECMA predessor if they want to appear standards compliant.

MS has put up a big smoke and mirrors show of being more open. They have XML-ified their Office document formats. They appear to have standardized, but it’s business as usual. Most people look at the surface and don’t dive in to discover the nitty gritty of it. If MS, MS Office and Standards are in each others vicinity enough, most will asume that MS is standards compliant.

ODF right now is a promise of independence, but it can only come to fruition if the MS stranglehold on the Office market is truly broken. That means being able to interoperate seamlessly and undercut MS Office on price. That’s how MS got in the Office business themselves. StarOffice/OOo has seamless interoperability with the plugin and they are cheaper. Still, charging for the plugin is not a smart move. It puts up a monetary barrier to seamless interoperability.

The people who care about long term viability of documents and open standards are severely outnumbered.

Most people will not see this as a call to ditch MS Office, but more as a price hike for StarOffice/OOo. The environment in businesses is near 100% MS already and current documents work fine. StarOffice/OOo is only an option if it can work with MS Office in the mix. Legacy docs and OOXML are out of the question. ODF is an option if MS Office and StarOffice/OOo put out the same format. This is what the plugin does, but that plugin is now about 20% of the cost of one MS license.(Never mind you need 100 licenses minimum to be able to use it.) People will add the cost of the plugin to StarOffice/OOo, not MS Office. In an MS centric world, it’s StarOffice/OOo who needs the plugin to be able to work with MS Office.

It might sound completely illogical to you (and it is), but most people I’ve met tend to follow this kind of thinking. PHB’s do this too.

While Microsoft Office comes out top (72%), open source rival OpenOffice is already installed on 21.5% of all PCs and growing.

…

The method used in the study is quite clever as it neither depends on sales figures (quite difficult to assess for a free software product) nor on questionnaires (prone to sampling bias). Instead, they have equipped their web statistics service with the ability to detect the fonts installed on the computers visiting the monitored sites.

…

For OpenOffice, the number of 21.5% is already impressive. But even more telling is the trend showing that during the last year OpenOffice steadily gained 3 percentage points. But what surprised me the most is that the authors hardly found a difference between home and business users. These observations mean nothing but OpenOffice is rapidly making inroads into Microsoft’s #1 cash cow!

72% and falling at a rate of 3% per year is a long, long way from 100%.

BTW, the cost of OOo, both before and after this announcement, was and still is $0.

The price hike announced is $90 per copy for an ODF plugin for Microsoft Office (minimum quantity of 100). That has absolutely nothing to do with the price of OOo.

Lemur, I know your style of debate and your rabbid adherance to your point of view. You are correct from your angle, but this isn’t about a black and white numbers game. This is about perception and the squishy thing we call human nature.

You didn’t get what I wrote (I probably wasn’t explicit enough). You would see where I’m coming from if you stepped out of your shoes and stepped into the shoes of the 80% MS Office only shops. They are not going to drop MS Office wholesale if ODF support for it becomes costly. Their documents are probably mostly MS based and they might consider switching to a less costly Office suite, if it works seamlessly with MS Office. The gratis plugin was that bridge.

Now they are faced with a steep pricetag just to be able to get an outsider Office suite in. They probably are not interested in OOo/Oracle Open Office because it uses ODF. They are looking to reduce cost. From the angle of an MS shop it is not License MS Office $ xx + License ODF plugin $ yy = Total $ zz. They have already paid for the current MS Office licenses, so any further cost of those is $ 0. They are looking at OOo/Oracle Open Office and then see they will have to pay X for Oracle Open Office, zero for OOo, but $ 9000 minimum to make the outsider suite work well with MS Office. Dragging in the stranger costs additional money.

I’d like the world to see the light, but I don’t see the world running out and scream “Hosanna, we now have a gratis Office suite that supports ODF!” The starting point is a predominantly MS Office world and for better or worse OOo/Oracle Open Office needs to make itself fit in there. If adding in 200 seats of OOo on a 4,000 seat MS Office setup adds 4,000 * $ 18 = $ 72,000 additional costs, it is cheaper to do 200 * $ 300 = $ 60,000 MS Office Licenses. It costs less and it comes with the short term added benefit of having zero conversion problems. (Assuming a 4,000 seat license makes you eligible for the $ 18 per seat pricetag for the plugin.) Pricing Source: http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20100…

The equasion of being cheaper with switching wholesale to Oracle Open Office, only comes to pass if you are on a trajectory to ditch MS Office permanently and in a relatively short time. In all other scenarios, the pricing of the plugin comes as an unpleasant surprise.

If one wants to work with ODF, which is an excellent thing to do from the point of view of interoperability, by far the best choice is OpenOffice.org.

And here’s the problem: Right now only OpenOffice.org can work reliably with ODF and the free plugin for MS Office (the main, some may say single competitor!) is not an argument anymore now that Oracle charges money for it.

Some may draw the conclusion that over all, ODF is not that interoperable in practice when compared to the shitty .doc format.

If one wants to work with ODF, which is an excellent thing to do from the point of view of interoperability, by far the best choice is OpenOffice.org.

And here’s the problem: Right now only OpenOffice.org can work reliably with ODF and the free plugin for MS Office (the main, some may say single competitor!) is not an argument anymore now that Oracle charges money for it.

Some may draw the conclusion that over all, ODF is not that interoperable in practice when compared to the shitty .doc format.

It is pretty hard to maintain a credible position that OpenDocument is not interoperable in the face of this list:

Probably a move to encourage people/companies to install OpenOffice instead of a plug-in to access ODF files.

They certainly aren’t looking to make a business out of selling $90 plug-ins that have a minimum 100 license purchase.

At some point Larry will expect big corps to start paying for OpenOffice. He’s not going to run it as a charity or even as a long play against Microsoft. If big corps are saving money by using it then he’ll expect a cut.

This means that no matter what Oracle try to do with OpenOffice.org, they must release future versions as open source (because future versions will be based on the current source code, which is licesnsed under a strong copyleft license).

Ergo, community forks of openOffice cannot be made to stagnate, as they will have full access to whatever code changes Oracle may make (to OpenOffice itself) in the future.

Any extra closed functionality that Oracle introduce exclusively to StarOffice are already replicated elsewhere, such as OxygenOffice (for things like extra templates) and Go-OO (for things like macro compatibility with VBA).

Ah, But! If they own the copyright on the code, or track down what isn’t theirs and weed it out, then they can license it however they want.

One can’t “take back” code that has been released as GPL.

Oracle could release future extensions of OpenOffice as closed source, but since OpenOffice.org is already outstripped by other open source variants in terms of extensions, Oracle would then become an also-ran to that market with an unattractive offering.

No you are wrong. If one releases a piece of software as GPL or other Open Source, the copyright remains with the original author. The author can at any time use sourcecode for that he owns the copyright for any purpose he likes. This includes releasing closed source versions.

That’s also why some open source projects only accept code contributions, if the copyright is assigned to the entity that runs it. e.g. OpenOffice, MySQL and GNU.

To be clear: the code released as GPL will still be free. But the author can release his software with a license he chooses.

So any closed functionality that they add in the future will be duplicated in a timely matter by the people’s FOSS army? Funny how Johnathan Schwartz also believed in that army. He thought the FOSS army would show up and turn OO in an MS Office killer.

In reality most OpenOffice commits have been from in-house developers.

If Oracle pushes closed source functionality they will likely only charge for large companies. The people’s FOSS army is not going to rush in and duplicate functionality just so megacorps can skip out on paying Oracle.

So any closed functionality that they add in the future will be duplicated in a timely matter by the people’s FOSS army? Funny how Johnathan Schwartz also believed in that army. He thought the FOSS army would show up and turn OO in an MS Office killer. In reality most OpenOffice commits have been from in-house developers. http://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/ooo-commit-stats-2008.html Here’s what your OpenOffice community really looks like: http://people.gnome.org/~michael/images/2008-09-29-overall.png If Oracle pushes closed source functionality they will likely only charge for large companies. The people’s FOSS army is not going to rush in and duplicate functionality just so megacorps can skip out on paying Oracle.

The problem with your reasoning here is that extensions to OpenOffice functionality, such as VBA support, extra templates and fonts and so on, are already provided by open source variants, such as go-OO and OxygenOffice, and AFAIK also by commercial variants, such as Symphony. It is the Sun version (now Oracle) that is behind (primarily through Sun wanting to retain full control, and rejecting external contributions, one would think. Hence the multiple forks).

Oracle would have to do the duplication of effort, not the open source variants.

The problem with your reasoning here is that extensions to OpenOffice functionality, such as VBA support, extra templates and fonts and so on, are already provided by open source variants, such as go-OO and OxygenOffice, and AFAIK also by commercial variants, such as Symphony. It is the Sun version (now Oracle) that is behind.

Oracle would have to do the duplication of effort, not the open source variants.

The problem with your reasoning is that it is based on the assumption that business software is purchased in the same manner that you download software for your own use.

You really think Oracle would have to sell a commercial version based solely on functionality? You really are naive. All they have to do is create the perception that the commercial version is what all the big time corporations buy. Their commercial version would also come with support from a major corp which is something those variants can’t provide. Don’t underestimate how many CTOs are leery of using software that isn’t stamped with a corporate seal of approval.

The problem with your reasoning here is that extensions to OpenOffice functionality, such as VBA support, extra templates and fonts and so on, are already provided by open source variants, such as go-OO and OxygenOffice, and AFAIK also by commercial variants, such as Symphony. It is the Sun version (now Oracle) that is behind. Oracle would have to do the duplication of effort, not the open source variants.

The problem with your reasoning is that it is based on the assumption that business software is purchased in the same manner that you download software for your own use. You really think Oracle would have to sell a commercial version based solely on functionality? You really are naive. All they have to do is create the perception that the commercial version is what all the big time corporations buy. Their commercial version would also come with support from a major corp which is something those variants can’t provide. Don’t underestimate how many CTOs are leery of using software that isn’t stamped with a corporate seal of approval.

Despite Microsoft’s desperate efforts to keep a monopoly with non-interoperability of its Office formats, this level of market share for OpenOffice is perhaps starting to approach a “tipping point” (similar to the IE vs Firefox tipping point having been reached for Internet browsers).

Despite your claim of “reluctance”, OpenOffice and variants are starting to get decent market share:

Does reluctance mean refuse? But more importantly OpenOffice has been backed by Sun which used to have a corporate stamp until the FOSS loving CEO gave everything away without coming up with a business plan.

Having a corporate stamp is a major value addition for most CTOs. This is because most of them are chicken sh#@s that don’t want to risk using non-corporate software. If some kink in the system breaks they want to be able to point their finger at a large entity that other big companies were also depending on. It’s an attempt at absolving themselves from future responsibility.

Despite Microsoft’s desperate efforts to keep a monopoly with non-interoperability of its Office formats

Have you ever used MS Office? It’s really quite snazzy. I bet the snazziness could calm your anger.

Despite your claim of “reluctance”, OpenOffice and variants are starting to get decent market share:

Does reluctance mean refuse? But more importantly OpenOffice has been backed by Sun which used to have a corporate stamp until the FOSS loving CEO gave everything away without coming up with a business plan. Having a corporate stamp is a major value addition for most CTOs. This is because most of them are chicken sh#@s that don’t want to risk using non-corporate software.

This is a strange attitude that is slowly changing. It is actually far more of a risk to use something proprietary, especially when the BSA invites itself in to your premises after a tip-off from a disgruntled former employee.

If some kink in the system breaks they want to be able to point their finger at a large entity that other big companies were also depending on. It’s an attempt at absolving themselves from future responsibility.

Despite the pointing of fingers, though, nothing is done about their problem. To the vendor of the software product that has gone wrong on them, their problem is a mere blip on the radar. Indeed, the proprietary software vendor might treat their particular problem (such as a need to handle SVG files, for example, or a need for a workflow to inter-operate with Macs) as “won’t fix”.

Despite Microsoft’s desperate efforts to keep a monopoly with non-interoperability of its Office formats

Have you ever used MS Office? It’s really quite snazzy. I bet the snazziness could calm your anger.

I am required to use Office quite regularly. Snazziness is no substitute for true interoperability and future-proofing. Snazziness doesn’t count for much when one cannot read a document saved on another machine using an earlier or later version of Office. Snazziness is no help when your project uses a different architecture to Windows, and Office platform exclusivity is the cause of problems to support your product. A new snazzy version of Office doesn’t impress customers much when, say, a database application (wherein they have their own valuable data stored) no longer works. The snazziest current version of Office won’t be executable on machines of 20 to 30 years hence, causing your archived documents to effectively become digital gibberish.

So any closed functionality that they add in the future will be duplicated in a timely matter by the people’s FOSS army? Funny how Johnathan Schwartz also believed in that army. He thought the FOSS army would show up and turn OO in an MS Office killer.

…

The people’s FOSS army is not going to rush in and duplicate functionality just so megacorps can skip out on paying Oracle.

I think you might be seriously underestimating OpenOffice and the extent of its development and community participation.

I think you might be seriously underestimating OpenOffice and the extent of its development and community participation.

Oh am I? Is Michael Meeks also ‘seriously underestimating’ community participation in this interview?

“Michael Meeks, who works full time developing OpenOffice, writes in his blog that the project is ‘profoundly sick.’ ‘In a healthy project we would expect to see a large number of volunteer developers involved, in addition â€” we would expect to see a large number of peer companies contributing to the common code pool; we do not see this in OpenOffice.org. Indeed, quite the opposite we appear to have the lowest number of active developers on OO.o since records began: 24, this contrasts negatively with Linux’s recent low of 160+. Even spun in the most positive way, OO.o is at best stagnating from a development perspective.'”

I think you might be seriously underestimating OpenOffice and the extent of its development and community participation.

Oh am I? Is Michael Meeks also ‘seriously underestimating’ community participation in this interview? “Michael Meeks, who works full time developing OpenOffice, writes in his blog that the project is ‘profoundly sick.’ ‘In a healthy project we would expect to see a large number of volunteer developers involved, in addition â€” we would expect to see a large number of peer companies contributing to the common code pool; we do not see this in OpenOffice.org. Indeed, quite the opposite we appear to have the lowest number of active developers on OO.o since records began: 24, this contrasts negatively with Linux’s recent low of 160+. Even spun in the most positive way, OO.o is at best stagnating from a development perspective.'”

No, that is all fair enough. Sun really didn’t allow OO.o to be a fully-fledged community project, and Sun kept tight reign over what contributions were accepted.

As a consequence, much of the community effort that still surrounds OO.o is directed at plugins and extensions, and the innovative community development of the OO.o core application itself has moved to other forks.

From the perspective of one such as “Michael Meeks, who works full time developing OpenOffice”, community participation in the OpenOffice core code might indeed seem sick. But he is talking about OpenOffice.org itself, and not its plugins, extensions, variants or forks.

If openOffice.org is even more tightly controlled by Oracle than it was by Sun, then it won’t be the core distribution any longer. Another variant or fork will be.

So, since Sun has tightly controlled OpenOffice for ~10 years, we’d expect forks by now. While there are different distributions that include various add-ons, none are close to warranting the term ‘fork’.

As nt_jerkface already pointed out, Sun has overwhelmingly dominated OpenOffice.org development. If Oracle spends those resources going its own way, there would need to be much more community participation to replace it than we’ve seen in OpenOffice in the last 10 years – I don’t mean more templates, I mean more people focusing on the guts of some pretty scary C++ code.

Or, as time has shown in open source before, users != developers, and without developers, projects stagnate and/or die. OpenOffice hasn’t built a development community in 10 years, and Oracle isn’t really a community type of company.

OpenOffice has been poorly managed from what I’ve heard in past. The reason that it has been forked already was because of Sun holding to close a control over the project and rejecting the majority of submissions from third party developers. As a result, it’s become a mostly in-house developed FOSS project with Novell or IBM (think the latter) shipping there own fork of OpenOffice including rejected submissions.

This is not true, as long as Oracle holds copyright they can close of development as they please. As it happens they don’t even have to do any license weeding as suggested by another post, since the contributions are governed by this:

In order to contribute code to the project, you must sign and submit the Sun Microsystems Inc. Contributor Agreement (SCA). This agreement jointly assigns copyright over your work to yourself and to Sun Microsystems.

So Oracle now holds complete copyright on the OpenOffice codebase. And knowing Oracle there certainly will not be any development of some open source project which does not directly financially benefit Oracle. Also, as noted by other posts, the community involvement in OpenOffice is minimal at best, so the project is largely done for as far as progress is concerned. It will surely be maintained in its current state as a poor clone of Office 97, but I don’t see much hope for the future beyond that.

I don’t even dare to think about what will happen to Java in the future. If anything .NET seems like a better place to be at this point, since Mono is a far more compelling replacement for the Microsoft implementation than any non-Sun JVM is for the old Sun JVM. The JVM may be open-source, but Java has somehow managed to stay a single-vendor world (most other JVM offerings are just licensed modifications of the Sun JVM) to this day, and Oracle is now the single vendor.

OxygenOffice Professional contains more extras like templates, cliparts, samples, fonts and VBA support)(…) makes it a far better value choice than Office 2010.

(…) $499 for the top-whack version. One can buy an OpenOffice variant PLUS a complete desktop(…)

That depends on what you want to do. MS office includes more applications that OO: One Note and Outlook. Also Powerpoint is so much better than Impress, it’s not even funny. OO Writer and Calc are the only good parts of OO.

I think 500 $ is not too expensive, if you make your money using these tools.

But since you are the kind of person that likes 500 $ computers, you obviously prefer price over quality.

OxygenOffice Professional contains more extras like templates, cliparts, samples, fonts and VBA support)(…) makes it a far better value choice than Office 2010.

(…) $499 for the top-whack version. One can buy an OpenOffice variant PLUS a complete desktop(…)

That depends on what you want to do. MS office includes more applications that OO: One Note and Outlook. Also Powerpoint is so much better than Impress, it’s not even funny. OO Writer and Calc are the only good parts of OO.

If I choose to get a system unencumbered by any Microsoft software, included in my outlay I still get the same functionality as One Note and Outlook.

I’m not following you. Why would anyone pay for a “Sun ODF plugin for Microsoft Office” if they actually used OpenOffice?

They don’t expect anyone to pay which is the point. Oracle is likely charging a high price so people/companies who are currently using MS Office install OpenOffice instead of a plug-in to access ODF files. It’s a move to increase marketshare.

Their Oracle Apps works with Microsoft Office. Mostly they will change that to OpenOffice. For those customer who doesn’t want to change their office applications to Open Office just because of Oracle Apps, support might this need to buy this plugin. Oracle might not support anyother open source/freeware ODF plugin.

If my above guess is correct they would earn a lot from this, as Oracle Apps is #2 ERP application in this work.

That’s not good. Altought i think the old versions of the plugin can still be downloaded without any fee (at least, there are some locations where this is offered), there is a big problem for the future.

Especially that you need to buy 100 licenses is kinda …strange. In which buisness you will buy tons of licenses, just to work on those small amount of documents, that has been written with OpenOffice ???

Sun was a hardware and technology company, so they gave away their software. Oracle was software company and is now a software and hardware company. So they stopped giving away the ‘highend software’ of the spectrum.

Solaris 10 will be closed. OpenSolaris will be open. Just like RedHat and… the open version Fedora(?).

OpenSolaris is delayed because of bugs in new functionality deduplication. It will be released when the bugs are ironed out. Which sounds reasonable?

I don’t see it happening; what I think we’ll see is non-core functionality will be not be open sourced but instead provided by Oracle as a value added component of Solaris. At the end of the day, however, OpenSolaris and Solaris were always going to be entirely different beasts but it is disappointing that of all the emancipation projects that the i18n libc never got off the ground.

Solaris and OpenSolaris will be entirely different beasts because they’re targeted at different markets; Solaris is for the big company who want the tried and true, well tested Solaris – they want features but they’re happy not to be on the bleeding edge. OpenSolaris on the other hand can be the play pen for new ideas to be tried out and hopefully what that’ll mean in the future is for HAL to be removed and replaced with native tools working together

Sun was a hardware and technology company, so they gave away their software. Oracle was software company and is now a software and hardware company. So they stopped giving away the ‘highend software’ of the spectrum.

I see. They will soon begin to offer free hardware, then. That’s good news, I’d like a sparcstation.

Apparently Oracle doesn’t. It really looks like they’re driving the generosity and open source friendliness of Sun straight down into the ground. The future is looking bleak for Sun’s great line of open source tools… I’m expecting Oracle to crush it any time soon. Hopefully some people can get a team together to fork them… at this time it’s looking to be a real necessary solution.

People thought the Novell/Microsoft deal harmed open source. Hah, if anything appears to really have the potential to do it, it’s Oracle.

I don’t really know Oracle, but my first impressions can be summed up as “disaster.” I didn’t think it’d stop with the re-closing of Solaris, though.

For me, Oracle is the IBM of the past, black suit men only thinking about how they can squeeze a profit out of every product.

Heh, at those prices for a simple ODF plugin which used to not cost a penny, even compared the price of MS Office itself… it seems like gouging is the proper term. It’s disturbing, really, the way some companies so arrogantly-price some of their stuff that–quite honestly–isn’t worth more than a tiny fraction of their asking price. And I thought Microsoft (Windows, X360) and Sony (PS2/PS3) were bad…

For me, Oracle is the IBM of the past, black suit men only thinking about how they can squeeze a profit out of every product.

Heh, at those prices for a simple ODF plugin which used to not cost a penny, even compared the price of MS Office itself… it seems like gouging is the proper term. It’s disturbing, really, the way some companies so arrogantly-price some of their stuff that–quite honestly–isn’t worth more than a tiny fraction of their asking price. And I thought Microsoft (Windows, X360) and Sony (PS2/PS3) were bad…

If you want to use ODF, your only real choice now is OpenOffice.org, or one of its off-shoots such as Symphony.

OpenOffice.org reamins zero cost, and outstanding value for money.

Microsoft Office is no longer a competitive choice for producing standards-compliant documents.

In recent discussions of OpenOffice.org marketshare, two key facts stand out. The first is that OOoâ€™s marketshare is much higher than most observers expected, and the second is that Microsoft Officeâ€™s marketshare is much lower than common knowledge has long dictated.

It is admittedly a much slower process than the way that Firefox weaned significant numbers away from using IE, but it is entirely similar.

It was about this same point, when Firefox had grabbed between 10% and 20% of the market, that the use of IE began to really slip away more rapidly. Eventually, Microsoft had to move its IE browser to more interoperability and standards compliance, or it would suffer an even greater erosion of its share.

Microsoft Office market share of Office suites has dropped of late down to perhaps 80% of the market. OpenOffice has taken up nearly all of the slack.

Interesting, but that doesn’t mean much when MS Office is still utterly dominant where you work.

I provide some IT services for British charities and see thousands of documents from hundreds of different organisations and companies. So far I haven’t seen a single OpenOffice document in the wild. Everything that isn’t PDF is in Microsoft Office formats.

I can see small businesses that don’t deal with any outside bodies switching happily, but the organisations I deal with get MS Office documents emailed to them daily. I wish that would change, I’d love to be able to recommend free software like OpenOffice to under-funded charities, but right now that’s just not practical.

Microsoft Office market share of Office suites has dropped of late down to perhaps 80% of the market. OpenOffice has taken up nearly all of the slack.

Interesting, but that doesn’t mean much when MS Office is still utterly dominant where you work. I provide some IT services for British charities and see thousands of documents from hundreds of different organisations and companies. So far I haven’t seen a single OpenOffice document in the wild. Everything that isn’t PDF is in Microsoft Office formats. I can see small businesses that don’t deal with any outside bodies switching happily, but the organisations I deal with get MS Office documents emailed to them daily. I wish that would change, I’d love to be able to recommend free software like OpenOffice to under-funded charities, but right now that’s just not practical. Issues with plugins certainly don’t help matters.

Interesting, but that doesn’t mean much when you have to work with ODF to exchange documents with your government or with an organistation you are working with, such as NATO.

The support for Microsoft Office formats is comprehensive, but not absolutely total. Nevertheless, you can feel absolutely safe in recommending OpenOffice to charities, as it is very unlikely there will be any problem. They will have far less document exchange and interoperability issues if they use OpenOffice than if they use Microsoft Office.

For me, Oracle is the IBM of the past, black suit men only thinking about how they can squeeze a profit out of every product.

True, but this is as opposed to Sun who were so unconcerned with their bottom line that they ran themselves into the ground. There’s a middle ground, and honestly I don’t think Oracle would need to charge anything like this for an Office plugin, but they do have to try and make profits on everything they do or acquire. They are after all a corporation, which is a synonym for greedy bastards.

If they are trying a strategic move though, it might just be brilliant. For the governments that use ODF, doesn’t Oracle now own Staroffice? If Oracle were to price Staroffice much lower than this plugin, they could put some serious pressure on Microsoft in certain markets. True there’s Openoffice, but governments tend to like to have commercial support behind the products they use so might be more likely to opt for Staroffice. Either way, it would work out well for everyone except Microsoft.

For the governments that use ODF, doesn’t Oracle now own Staroffice? If Oracle were to price Staroffice much lower than this plugin, they could put some serious pressure on Microsoft in certain markets. True there’s Openoffice, but governments tend to like to have commercial support behind the products they use so might be more likely to opt for Staroffice. Either way, it would work out well for everyone except Microsoft.

If one were being cynical, (which is often prudent when it comes to actions of Microsoft), then one would almost be tempted to conclude that Microsoft designed the ODF 1.0 alleged “support” within Microsoft Office 2007 more as an attempt at sabotage of the ODF format.

It appears as though Microsoft went out of their way to create interoperability problems.

Of course, I am not that cynical. I was taught to never assume malice where incompetence would be the simpler explanation. But the degree of incompetence needed to explain SP2’s poor ODF support boggles the mind and leads me to further uncharitable thoughts. So I must stop here.

And this surprises you? They didn’t even implement their own supposed OOXML standard according to the ISO spec they themselves lobbied for. If they can’t even get their own standard right, what hope is there that they’ll implement any other standard properly?

And this surprises you? They didn’t even implement their own supposed OOXML standard according to the ISO spec they themselves lobbied for. If they can’t even get their own standard right, what hope is there that they’ll implement any other standard properly?

I’m not at all surprised by it, I’m merely pointing out the fact of it.

There used to be a bit of a charade going on from Microsoft that Office was standards compliant and interoperable, and hence was a suitable product for use by governments and similar institutions.

This moves by Oracle effectively torpedoes that charade (if it wasn’t already utterly dead, it is now).

Any party which desires sovreignity over its own data clearly cannot contemplate using Microsoft Office.

Seems like Oracle’s policy towards ODF is now “If You need ODF, use OpenOffice”. So the high price for plug-in is supposed not to raise Oracle’s busines’ profitablity, but to raise the total cost of ownership for MS Office.

There probably is no strategy to the detriment or benefit of OpenOffice (or FOSS in general) here.

Oracle distinguishes (at least always had ) two kinds of software: a) proprietary, e. g. the ODF plug-in for MS Office or Oracle Developer, for which it charges money, and b) FOSS, e. g. BerkeleyDB or mySQL, which you will get at no cost.

Now the plug-in is proprietary, therefore Oracle charges money for it. This will change if they decide to open source it.

You can charge for support. I’d give you that. Charging for the plug-in, I’d give you that, albeit reluctantly. Charging almost as much as a cheap edition of Office for a plug-in that does a format conversion is ignorant. Surely!

I am currently in a position where I have to exchange files back and forth with a few Lotus Symphony users – don’t ask! – and thus Sun’s ODF plug-in was a life saver.

As most people are clueless about the differences between MS Office documents and ODF documents and the fact that Symphony is even worse than standard OO.org when handling certain Office documents, I kind of became the go-to guy when problems arise. I simply open the documents in MS Office and save it to its equivalent Symphony-compatible file. It certainly has helped us in the interoperability front here.

I doubt that I will convince management to provide the funds for this plug-in now.

I knew that I would regret this Sun-Oracle merger further down the line…

Are there other free plugins available elsewhere that will give MS Office (2007) full ODF 1.2 support?

There is a clear need for this. Take my case for example:

I’m currently trying to push ODF in an organization because I believe in open standards, and because I find MS Office to be poor quality software compared to alternatives like OpenOffice. Given this is a business setting, everyone seems to be using MS Office 2007 except me. I prefer OpenOffice. They can read my ODF files but anything saved using MS Office messes up layouts.

I can’t and won’t force these people to switch to OpenOffice at this time, so I wanted to suggest they install the Sun ODF plugin. Now, given the costs this no longer is a viable option. I can only convert them to better office productivity software by first having them experience ODF within Office before showing them better full-fledged alternatives like OpenOffice.

Are there other free plugins available elsewhere that will give MS Office (2007) full ODF 1.2 support?

There is a clear need for this. Take my case for example:

I’m currently trying to push ODF in an organization because I believe in open standards, and because I find MS Office to be poor quality software compared to alternatives like OpenOffice. Given this is a business setting, everyone seems to be using MS Office 2007 except me. I prefer OpenOffice. They can read my ODF files but anything saved using MS Office messes up layouts.

I can’t and won’t force these people to switch to OpenOffice at this time, so I wanted to suggest they install the Sun ODF plugin. Now, given the costs this no longer is a viable option. I can only convert them to better office productivity software by first having them experience ODF within Office before showing them better full-fledged alternatives like OpenOffice.

One can always install both OpenOffice and Microsoft Office on each machine at the same time.

AFAIK, it is also possible to put OpenOffice on a server, and let everyone use that copy.

I think for home users it’s irrelevant. As they would install Openoffice and MS Office in parallel. It’s the same way i work, even under the consideration that i’m getting all this stuff as a Sun employee for free. I’m using the best tool for import, convert it in a file format readable by Openoffice. With the advent of docx support in Openoffice this is relatively seldom now.

The targeted audience for this plugin is more or less the business user, not willing to use MS office 2007 SP2, which is enabled to create ODF, out of some reasons and not willing to do a dual installation. The value proposition is simple: You can opt to choose $90 for the plugin or $299 plus macro/app validation plus training for Office 2007 SP2.

As long Openoffice stays free, i have no problem with such things …. and as Openoffice is opensource it’s like toothpaste, you can’t put it back once it’s out …

1. Only large organizations would really be interested in an ODF Office plugin. Everyone else can simply open an ODF document in OpenOffice, which is 100% free and open source, and do a “Save As”, and choose the .doc format (or PDF, or HTML, or whatever).

2. Giving it away for free reduces it’s value in the minds of large organizations. They don’t want to depend on a “free” product. They want to pay for it, or pay for support for it. Look at Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is expensive, and extremely profitable. Prior to going with that strategy, Red Hat sold for about $50 at places like BestBuy. At that time, Red Hat had always lost money.

3. Charging for an ODF plugin ensures that it will receive continued development resources.

I’ve observed this to be true, but perhaps for a different reason. IT execs that don’t like free and opensource tend to think in terms of CYA: as long as you’re paying a vendor for a product, you have someone to blame and sue when it “breaks.” I don’t know that this situation applies here though.

While I’ve never used the plugin (exactly – using OOo and MS Office in parallel) and this is probably one of many more such Oracle’s moves we’ll see – completely understandable and indeed not touching the home user that much and corporations either, it just saddens me a bit. Something has ended. Sun did many cool things, in many cool ways, and usually shared the goodies with the world. Huh. I wonder what’s next – NFS? Java? …Sun glasses?

You could see many signs of Oracle’s sneakiness before it acquired Sun – some more and some less widely known, but the master plan shines through:

I can only speculate, but I would have thought that this is pretty damaging to the reputation of ODF. Imagine an organisation had taken the bold move to move to a standardised document format (perhaps to avoid future lock-in) everything is going fine until they suddenly find out they need to pay $90 per seat, to continue to access their files using the software that their staff are familiar with. That said, if they already have the software downloaded and installed, I don’t suppose they will need to pay anything.

*edit forgot to mention, this is probably about levering money from large government clients who have moved decided to stipulate the use of open standards. If there is one thing Oracle knows, it is how to milk their cash cows. I wouldn’t be surprised if they released a ‘free for non-commercial use’ version, once they have signed their big clients into fat contracts.